Clean eating? It’s a hobby for the rich, bored and superior

The fashion for eating as if you had coeliac disease – that is, no gluten – has swelled in recent years but has finally – how to say? – bust a gut. Those useful experts at the British

Medical Journal, who do not post photographs of themselves eating berries on Instagram, but who do know about nutrition, even if they are ugly, have finally told us what the sane and slightly fat have always known: restricting the diet for no reason is bad for the heart. Coeliac disease is not an aspiration, or lifestyle choice. It is an affliction, and to eat as if you have it, when you do not, is a pitiful kind of vanity.

The “clean eating” movement is responsible for the anti-gluten trend, and it is a passiveaggressive form of oneupmanship, pushed by ignorant but photogenic bloggers. It is a hobby for the rich, bored and superior, for slenderness is a status symbol that separates you from the obese poor.

It takes time and money to gather the absurd ingredients necessary to eat “clean” and it also requires an obliviousness to the world beyond the kitchen. Do these people know what the natives are eating in South America, now that their staple grain, quinoa, is so valuable in the West? Frozen pizza mostly. Clean eating for me, but not for you.

I do not really care if Gwyneth Paltrow starves herself to death, or if Deliciously Ella’s hair falls out, because I resent looking at it, but I do worry about young women who, ever vigilant for ways to punish themselves, see clean eating as a salvation – at least until they lose so much body fat that they stop menstruating. Most will recover. But not all.

It also has an end-of-days decadence – the decadence to starve when you have plenty – and a scent of victimhood that makes the clean eater feel important, and loved; it is cod spiritual hypochondria. I am sick, says the clean eater, I must avoid meat, sugar, carbohydrates, caffeine. (Delete or add at will. It is all made up.) She is not sick, but the hoax has been exposed. She soon will be. I am haunted by a woman I met at a Spanish “health” retreat. For one week we drank only fruit juice, and ate nothing. I was there for work; feminine self-hatred sells newspapers. She was eight weeks pregnant.

I have tried several clean-eating retreats, and it is always the same. I eat the nothing they give me, I go home, I eat normally, my immune system crashes and I am ill for three months. But this is anecdotal testimony, even if I did not post a photograph of myself weeping on Instagram, and you can ignore it.

Clean-eating restaurants are opening across London and, as restaurant critic at the Spectator, it is my job to review them, even as I tell my readers: go to Rules, specialists in puddings and pies, you’ll have more fun. (There is a painting of Margaret Thatcher on the wall.) I have tried only one, called The Bunyadi. It served raw meat and melon and berries, and everyone was naked. And, in that ludicrous hobbit-y space – we ate off tree trunks and our naked waiter thought he was a faun – I saw the pitiful groping of the clean-living movement, backwards, towards an idealised past it does not understand. Live like a backwoods hermit by all means. But not in a Marylebone town house. That’s just stupid.